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The Healing Promise

The Healing Promise
By Richard Mayhue
Mentor Books, Christian Focus Publications. 288 pages.
ISBN 1 85792 302 2

Richard Mayhue is an associate of John MacArthur, who provides both a foreword and a chapter on a healing experience of his wife, Grace. Joni Eareckson-Tada and Andre Kole also write chapters. Kole, a Campus Crusade staff worker who is 'regarded as one of the foremost magicians and illusionists in the world today', contributes on his encounters with Benny Hinn.
There are three main sections to the book, dealing with modern faith healing, the biblical data on healing, and a Christian response to the issue of sickness.
The main body of the book is a solid Reformed treatment. The position of the author is that God can and does sometimes heal today, but that much that is claimed by healers is false, misleading, or simply not on the same level as the Divine healing found in Scripture. Mayhue assumes that sign miracles and healings, along with other supernatural 'gifts', declined through the period of the New Testament and were not needed after the sub-apostolic period. He is therefore a practical cessationist.
However, for those of us who do not share these presuppositions, there is still much valuable analysis, observation and Biblical content in the book. Mayhue is at his best presenting and analysing data. There are helpful charts and lists of Biblical healings. His treatment of the difficult issue of the link between sickness and sin, applied to James 5.9, is especially insightful. The three 'guest' chapters are also very helpful. In particular, the account of the healing of Grace MacArthur following a serious road accident is moving and inspiring. It serves to raise faith and expectation in the goodness and healing grace of God when other chapters in the book might have led the reader to conclude that God rarely, if ever, heals anyone, apart from their deliverance into heaven. It feels like an antidote to the clinical neatness of much of the book.
All in all, this is a stimulating book. It is especially useful for pastors grappling with the biblical material. It does not begin to address wider questions about the place of healing miracles in mission to post-modern pagans, Muslims and others. I would have liked more than brief references to the semantics of claims of the dead being raised.

Roger Welch
Tattenham Corner Evangelical Church